PI's Weekly Media Digest: DOJ and Baltimore police agree on reforms; Higher wages lead to healthier babies; and more
Welcome to our media digest for the week of August 12, 2016! Below you’ll find summaries of news coverage on the issues of preventing violence, trauma, nutrition, health equity, mental health, and more. The views expressed in these articles do not reflect those of Prevention Institute.
Community environments
Challenging decision-making about housing policy and community development
The Washington Post’s WonkBlog reports on the people who are left out of the process of setting housing policy: “we tend to make local policy — and housing policy in particular — as if the only people who matter in a community are the ones who go to bed there at night. We don't think of people who work but don't "live" there, or who'd like to live there but can't afford to, or who once lived there but had to leave, or who could access better jobs if only they could move there, or who commute through there as part of their daily lives. You may effectively live your life within, say, San Francisco or Washington, D.C., going to school there, working there, dropping your children at day care there, spending your money and your waking time there. But if, at the end of the day, you go sleep somewhere else, you are invisible to the process of how we decide what's right for that city…. One solution to this challenge is to make decisions at larger geographies that might capture more of the people we want to make policy for, as well as more of the policy goals that play out regionally (like reducing congestion, easing housing costs, enabling economic mobility). California Gov. Jerry Brown, for instance, has controversially proposed to streamline statewide decisions that are normally made at the local level about approving new developments that would include affordable housing.”
USA Today op-ed calls soda tax an intrusive, ineffective ‘money grab’
USA Today railed against soda taxes in an op-ed this week, arguing that they are "heavy on intrusion and light on impact," and arguing that better informed consumers is the solution to health challenges associated with sugary drinks, and accusing cities like Philadelphia of levying taxes on diet drinks “because the tax is a money grab disguised as a public health initiative.”
Earth Overshoot Day
Grist observes “Earth Overshoot Day,” marking “the point when humanity as a whole has used up the resources needed to live sustainably for a year… The day is declared every year by Global Footprint Network, a nonprofit research group that focuses on sustainability. The first Earth Overshoot Day was in Oct. 2006. It’s been creeping up the calendar ever since, landing on Aug. 19 in 2014, and just last year, reaching Aug. 13. The earlier Earth Overshoot Day falls, the more rapidly we’ve been using the planet’s natural resources.”
Violence Prevention and Unintentional Injury
DOJ and Baltimore police agree on reforms
The DOJ and Baltimore police agreed to negotiate court-enforceable reforms after a scathing federal report released Wednesday criticized officers for using excessive force and routinely discriminating against African-Americans. The report cites the city’s “zero-tolerance” policing practices, dating to the late 1990s, as responsible for “repeated violations of the constitutional and statutory rights, further eroding the community’s trust in the police.” Approximately 44 percent of pedestrian stops occur in just “two small, predominantly African-American districts that contain only 11 percent of the city’s population,” the report states. “Consequently, hundreds of individuals—nearly all of them African American—were stopped on at least 10 separate occasions from 2010–2015. Indeed, seven African-American men were stopped more than 30 times during this period.” Pedestrian stops often occur without any reasonable suspicion. According to the report, only 3.7 percent of pedestrian stops resulted in an actual citation or arrest, and “many of those arrested based upon pedestrian stops had their charges dismissed upon initial review by either supervisors at BPD’s Central Booking or local prosecutors.” In one stunning example of institutional racism, a police department template for documenting trespassing arrests already included the terms "BLACK MALE" and "PUBLIC HOUSING" filled in. Officers also frequently dismissed or mishandled sexual assault cases, part of a pattern of gender bias flagged by the DOJ. Between 2010 and 2014, just 15% of Baltimore rape kits were tested, and officers often declined to even interview suspects. “Carol Tracy, executive director of the women’s law project, said last year that race is an important part of the sexual assault conversation. “This gender bias is exacerbated when racial bias is added to it… where bias is explicit, and it is explicit throughout this country, it has to be rooted out. ... Rape victims are profiled as liars, from campus to Cosby.””
Law agencies and medical examiners to record deaths of individuals in police custody
The Justice Department (DOJ) says it will now ask law enforcement agencies and medical examiner's offices to fill out forms when there is a news report or another indication that a person died while in police custody. Korryn Gaines, a 23-year-old mother of two, was shot and killed last week after an hours-long standoff with the Baltimore police. Her son, five, who was himself shot by the police, captured the video of Gaines, and then uploaded it to Instagram. The author ponders why, despite black women and girls accounting for 20% of unarmed people killed by the police, they’re actively erased from larger narratives around police brutality. Meanwhile, the International Documentary Association issued a statement rallying the community to push the DOJ to investigate the arrests of people who use their cellphones to document police brutality. The statement makes the case for the #RightToRecord movement and reminds citizens that they are legally allowed to record police officers.
Autistic people of color at greater risk for police aggression
Last month, the North Miami SWAT team shot Charles Kinsey, a Black behavioral therapist who was trying to protect his autistic client, who had wandered away from his group home and was assumed to have a gun. After accidentally shooting Kinsey instead of Rio, the SWAT team arrested Rio and held him in handcuffs for three hours before he was released. The risk of avoidable police aggression against people with autism isn't a new concern -- autistic people of color are at even greater risk for aggressive police encounters because they tend to be diagnosed later than their white counterparts. (via BMSG)
East Bay Times op-ed calls for CA policy to protect healthcare workers from violence
This East Bay Times op-ed (by a nurse) argues in favor of California legislation to protect healthcare workers from violence by establishing a standard orientation focused on safety and preventing problems. The author notes, “Healthcare workers face extremely high levels of violence on the job, including physical, emotional, sexual and verbal assaults… nearly 5,000 incidents of workplace violence in health care settings were reported in California from 2010-2012.”
Uber is not linked to reduced traffic fatalities
City Lab covers a new study released by the American Journal of Epidemiology that found that Uber’s deployment in the nation’s 100 most-populated metro areas is not linked to reduced traffic fatalities—not in aggregate, not those caused by drunk driving, and not during weekends or holidays.
Health Equity
Creative empathy building techniques illuminate living below poverty line
ThinkProgress reports on advocacy organization efforts to combat ignorance and build empathy by developing a number of ways to mimic the real-life experience of living below the poverty line, such as the SNAP/Food Stamp Challenge and Minimum Wage Challenge. But one has started to take off that gives participants a sense of the full experience of life below the poverty line: the Missouri Community Action Network’s (CAN) Community Action Poverty Simulation. CAN’s simulation has grown in popularity over the last decade, selling over 1,100 of the $2,150 kits and even spreading overseas in countries such as Australia and South Korea. As the article notes, “Four out of five Americans will struggle with economic insecurity during their lives. Sixty percent of Americans will experience poverty for at least a year, and 25 percent for five or more years. Yet, despite this ubiquity, many people often struggle to understand what life in poverty is like.”
US Department of Labor to study logistics of implementing paid family leave
In an effort to study the impact of enacting paid family and medical leave programs, the U.S. Department of Labor will divide $1.1 million in federal funds between Denver, Colorado; Hawaii; Indiana; Franklin County, Ohio; Pennsylvania; and Madison, Wisconsin. Studying paid leave will enable lawmakers to obtain critical information about how much a program would cost and which agency should administer it.
Higher hourly wages lead to healthier babies
Two recent studies have found that higher hourly wages lead to healthier babies at birth and better prenatal care. About 60 percent of minimum wage earners are women, and two-thirds of them have children. Researchers hope that the results of the study will inspire economists and policymakers to broaden the minimum wage discussion beyond its effects on the economy and personal income.
More than half of Black American neighborhoods in WI are actually jails
This CityLab article reports on the fact that more than half of the African-American neighborhoods in Wisconsin are actually jails, and the rest of the Black neighborhoods are either apartment complexes, Section 8 housing, or homeless shelters—the lone exception being a working-middle class neighborhood of Milwaukee.
Does our foster care system punish Black families?
A story in Vox details a foster care system that punishes Black families. In her book, Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare (2001), University of Pennsylvania law professor Dorothy Roberts noted that foster care interventions are inextricably linked to ideas about the cultural failings of black families. As the article details, government authorities appear to believe that maltreatment of Black children results from pathologies intrinsic to their homes and that helping children requires dislocating them from their families. Roberts advocates for a shift toward restorative justice that addresses systemic issues like poverty that put Black families and Black children at risk, rather than the today’s punitive measures that are racially biased.
“Pain Gap” - after age 65, Black Americans have far more disabilities than whites
A recent study comparing pain treatment published in PLOS 1 found that Black patients with back or abdominal pain were consistently less likely to be given or prescribed opioid-based pain medication than white patients with identical symptoms. These new results contribute to the growing collection of research on how few black patients are accurately treated for serious pain — an error that’s left a disproportionate number of black people with lifelong disability as a result. Another recent study found that after age 65, Black Americans live with far more disabilities than whites, regardless of how long they live. The so-called “pain gap” often stems from doctors’ implicit biases about Black people, partly because under-representation of black physicians in the medical system, but also because of historic prejudices, including the “entirely false idea that black people have a higher tolerance for pain than white people.” Some med students believed black blood coagulates quicker than white blood — an unscientific excuse once used to justify the segregation of blood supply among races.”
California
Activists rally hard against Richmond Chevron refinery
Colorlines revisits the Chevron refinery fire that sickened 15,000 people in Richmond and the East Bay in 2012. A lawsuit the city filed against Chevron remains unresolved, and community organizers continue to push back against the refinery in its attempts to expand into processing even more toxic products, while addressing rising concerns about displacement. “Community organizers have been working on a campaign against Chevron for four years, says Andrés Soto, an organizer with environmental justice organization Communities for a Better Environment (CBE). Says Soto: "They are the primary boogeymen of environmental injustice in Richmond. They’re certainly not the only ones, but they’re the biggest ones.” Consequently, environmentalists are demanding a cap on Chevron's—and the four other surrounding refineries’—greenhouse gas emissions. This cap would also curb the toxic contaminants that refineries emit alongside carbon—including particulate matter, volatile organic compounds and sulfur dioxide.”
Oakland activists march to protest gun violence
Last Friday, young Oakland residents marched through East Oakland, the center of the city's gun violence epidemic, to protest crime in the black community. The march lasted about two hours, but no television crews or reporters from local news organizations showed up.
Mental health
Suicide prevention via better access to mental health services
This Health Affairs article focuses on opportunities to prevent suicide via better access to mental health services. The authors note as potential barriers lack of adequate screening (e.g. when someone presents at the ED with self-harm), lack of patient awareness, and uneven provider acceptance of insurance coverage. No mention of community conditions…
Overdose deaths in NYC have increased by 66% in past 5 years
ThinkProgress reports that the health department report shows overdose deaths in NYC have increased 66% over the past five years, including a huge jump in overdose deaths among Latino residents.
Member of Grantmakers in board of Health Affairs denounces stigmatizatoin
In a blog for Health Affairs, a member of Grantmakers in Health’s board and executive director of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health expresses his support for GIH’s decision to relocate its annual conference from Charlotte, North Carolina in response to passage of the Public Facilities Privacy and Security Act (HB2). He writes: “Stigma, whether perpetuated by family or ratified by a legislature, encroaches on emotional well-being and the ability of people to live whole and happy lives.”
Prince Harry’s regret about not discussing his mother’s death leads to coverage of men’s health
In support of the work of his family’s mental health charity, Heads Together, UK’s Prince Harry has been giving interviews expressing regret that he did not talk about his mother’s death. The interviews have spawned coverage about men’s mental health, including The Telegraph’s 13 famous fellas who want men to talk about mental health.
Boone County, Indiana task force develops plan to address heroin and opioid abuse
A multi-sector task force is developing a community plan to address heroin and opioid abuse in Boone County, Indiana, where 17 people have died from overdoses so far this year. Focus areas include prevention, mental health and medical treatment, and community engagement. Dr. Jennifer Walthall, Indiana’s deputy health commissioner: “We can’t arrest our way out of this problem… Not one single entity will be the solution to this problem, but all of us can be.”
Health Systems Transformation
Community Health Centers receive due accolades and publicity
Community Catalyst takes a deeper look at the critical role of community health centers which have traditionally been the primary source of care for underserved populations with the greatest health needs. The article goes on to provide examples of this model in action, including the North Carolina Community Health Center Association as well as a collection of stories from the Florida Association of Community Health Centers, Florida Council for Community Mental Health, and Florida Rural Health Association for their “Lives on the Line” initiative.
ACA provides health insurance to 20 million and reduces risk of medical debt
In Affordable Care Act (ACA) news, a Boston Globe article covers a collection of new studies showing it has not only provided health insurance to some 20 million people but has allowed more people to become less likely to have medical debt or to postpone care because of cost. Low-income U.S. residents living in two Medicaid expansion states reported better access to care and general health than those living in Texas, which did not expand Medicaid under ACA, according to a study published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine. Additionally, certain ACA provisions more effectively blocked the creation of new physician-owned hospitals (POHs) that any legislative effort in past 20 years, according to a study published this week in Health Affairs.
Billing data shows that medical devices allowing physicians to do tests in-office are driving Medicare spending increases
The Wall Street Journal covers new Medicare billing data indicating that new medical devices that allow physicians to conduct more tests in-office are driving Medicare spending increases, according to an analysis of Medicare billing data. The analysis found that four of the top 10 fastest-growing Medicare services between 2012 and 2014 involved new devices that allowed in-office medical testing for certain conditions.